Iraq war veteran Phil Klay is one of five writers under 35 who have been honoured by the National Book Foundation in the US as part of a “rising generation” of new authors.

Klay, a former US Marine who served as a public affairs officer in Iraq’s Anbar province, has published a collection of short stories, Redeployment, set in and around the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is joined by four other young writers selected for the prestigious honour: Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose novel Panic in a Suitcase mirrors her own family’s move from Odessa to Brooklyn, Alex Gilvarry, whose novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is a confession narrated from a US prison cell, Mexico City-born Valeria Luiselli and Kirstin Valdez Quade, who currently teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

The authors were chosen for the 5 Under 35, 2014 list by past National Book Award winners and finalists. Quade’s story collection Night at the Fiestas selected by 1999’s finalist Andre Dubus III; Quade said she was “still reeling from the call” informing her that she was to join an impressive list of former recipients of the honour, including Téa Obreht and Dinaw Mengestu.

“It means so much to me to have my book chosen by Andre Dubus III. I admire his work so deeply and the thought that he read my book is absolutely thrilling,” said Quade. Out next March, the stories in Night at the Fiestas “were written over almost a decade”, she said. “Most of them are set in northern New Mexico, where my family is from and where my extended family still lives. It’s the one place I’ve lived that feels like home, and it’s a place that I find I return to again and again in my writing.”

Luiselli, whose Faces in the Crowd sees an unhappy young mother in Mexico City writing a novel about her time in New York, was described in a Guardian review as “an exciting female voice to join a new wave of Latino writers”.

The writer told the Guardian that she felt “fortunate, of course, and very grateful” to be chosen for the National Book Foundation prize. “Octavio Paz used to say that prizes are just a fortunate coincidence,” she said. “I disagree with almost everything Paz said, but not with that simple, if rather esoteric truth. It takes a lot of people, time, and hard work to get a book published, and even more to keep it alive in the daunting aftermath of publication. But it also requires some sort of planetary luck ... These things would be impossible without the lunatic persistence of independent publishers, the commitment of serious readers, and the generosity of Pluto and Jupiter.”